Mobile Development overview of 2016

A lot has happened in 2016 in the mobile app development universe. Technology has been shifting this year. Not in the last place because of the improvements to, and added features in modern day browsers. Several of the ruling companies have changed gears and set course for a new strategic route.o

In this article, we’ll walk you through some of the epic changes – possibly, improvements – that happened in 2016 and also share you some overview resources to get a sense of the impact that 2016 had on the Mobile App development Industry.

For a recap of Facebook’s F8 event check out this recap video on Gummicube’s blog.

Xamarin Evolve + //Build Event shows how Microsoft has shifted gears and is working more and more with the open source community and – by acquiring Xamarin – gained a lot more expertise on mobile development.

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The EU Phonegap Days 2016 showed that Cordova and Phonegap are going strong and that both matured both on a platform level and their tooling. Cordova has become a rock solid platform for creating both consumer- and enterprise mobile solutions.

The weather has been turbulent in 2016 for cloud environments and MBaaS solutions. Parse, one of the biggest MBaaS players around, announced their retirement back in January 2016.
Parse dropped their software as open source on GitHub and provided tools & knowledge to help their users to host their solution for themselves.

Sure, it was a nice gesture but the only strategically correct option is to move on to another MBaaS solution or build one for yourself on a persistent cloud platform.

During 2016, Microsoft vastly improved the Azure Cloud and, together with the before mentioned VS Code and VS for Mac releases, refocussed key elements.
By repackaging and repricing the functional bits and pieces that can be used to create a mobile backend and host web services into Azure App Services, Microsoft made a very slick cloud proposition that provides all the necessary tools to create full blown web- or mobile App solutions.

Ionic Framework was going strong already but increased traction by creating a graphical interface, Ionic Creator, that makes building hybrid app fast and deadly easy. Ionics cloud proposition is named Ionic Cloud and contains more and more key features. From push-messaging to analytics and from deployment to authorisation services.

Recently Ionic has decided to focus their work on fewer things to increase value on their remaining services and keep pushing forward and refocus from a hybrid app development framework to a fully-fledged hybrid development platform.

What else?

The long anticipated framework Angular 2.0 was released in 2016, currently running at version 2.4.

On the other side of the same coin, Aurelia was released. Being founded by the man behind DurandalJS (who also was on board defining Angular 2 in its first days) this was also being watched by a lot of webs and mobile developers around the globe.

While this article didn’t even mention frameworks like React Native, NativeScript, and Titanium one thing is clear: both cloud and MBaaS services are growing up getting more and more complete by the year.
Big company takeovers and new framework versions have been introduced and the (open source) community support is a strong pillar that is being used by the big players out there.

After recalling the major events for this mobile development overview of 2016 and how all the technical stars are aligning, a mobile developer’s blood surely must be pumping heavily again.